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2011-10-03

KevJumba and Google Search Results

I know I'm quite late on this one, but I just thought of a better way to explain this somewhat recent TechDirt post on why US Senators' assertions that Google remove all biases and put up "natural" search results is wrongheaded, because Google's search results are inherently influenced by people's searches, companies' advertising, and Google's own algorithms. The issue, if I remember correctly, revolves around the fact that Google is advertising for Canadian drugs when people search online to buy drugs, and it is in some instances illegal to buy Canadian drugs that are the same type and quality as comparable American drugs. Since then, it has basically become an antitrust lawsuit against Google (or the two cases may be separate, I'm not sure which), despite the fact that Google doesn't seem to have done anything like Microsoft did in its monopoly position to actually bar other competitors from entering or raise costs for consumers, and that's the key to actually making an antitrust suit successful. Plus, the Senators themselves have basically admitted that the issue is to stop Google from growing for the sole sake of stopping it from getting to a certain size (and not actually for protecting consumers), and they've even claimed that Google was destined to succeed and monopolize, which is totally false given that quite a few famous names in computer technology predicted in 1998 that Google would fail and that in 1998, there were about 10 different big competing search engines, and few people thought Google could muscle into the market.
But I'd like to share a thought or two specifically regarding the "biased search results", and show why they would be inherently biased anyway. As I've mentioned a few times before, I'm a fan of the videos of Kevin Wu, who goes by KevJumba on YouTube. In the first video posted here, KevJumba tells the viewers about how searching on Google the phrase "Is KevJumba" yields "Is KevJumba gay?" as the first suggestion. Leaving aside the issues of homophobia and all that, it's clear that happened because thousands upon thousands of users searched for that, and that became the search result most associated with his name. In response, he asked his users to make the result a bit more masculine: "Is KevJumba a heterosexual bear wrestler?" In the second video posted here, KevJumba thanks the viewers for making his dream come true, as "Is KevJumba a heterosexual bear wrestler?" is now the first suggestion not only for the phrase "Is KevJumba" but also just for the word "Is". That only happened because of his legions of fans rushing to Google and searching it repeatedly to make that the best suggestion for the phrase "Is". That already shows in two ways the fact that Google has no "natural/unbiased" search results; for now, I rest my case.